I have been struggling with this for a while now, the reason or reasons why I feel that there is something amiss every time I take out a digital camera to capture a moment. Now, just to clear the air, I have never thought of myself as a professional photographer, but rather someone who enjoys taking pictures. I like the feel of seeing the world through a lens. What I like most is that once I see the picture, I remember what lay beyond the frame, and so the image becomes a visual milestone of sorts, from which I can recall the rest of the moment. I believe that part of the reason for this is because with film I used to take my time in composing the shot because I knew that film and processing was not cheap, and therefore each frame had a tangible value.
With the advent of digital cameras, the amount of frames you took was at first only limited by the size of the media that you could afford to put in your camera. But soon enough, portable media in seemingly gargantuan sizes became ubiquitous and the cameras themselves became smaller and cheaper, thus not only making the photos themselves disposable, but the hardware as well. Now, when I take a digital photograph, I spend less time on the composition, and as a result I spend less time pairing the context of the image with its content into my own visual memory. This is problematic because now when I look at the large volume of digital photographs, it’s almost as if I need more of them form the same moment to recall the full memory.
